User blog:Fiveofeight/Methods for determining enemy stats
Determining HP :*Poison: For most enemies (HP >=100), poison is the best method to determine their HP. Example: If your poison power takes away 6% of max HP each turn, then divide the amount of HP the enemy loses to poison by 0.06 to get the enemy's total HP. Note: This is often subject to rounding error; for instance, treat a number like 11999 as 12000. :*Counting pings: This is a slow way, but it is often the best option to determine the HP of enemies with high defence and low HP. Basically, attack/poison/whatever them for 1 damage increments and count how much damage it takes to defeat them. Note: If the enemy has both low HP and low defence, this may be difficult, but poison will work if the enemy has sufficient HP to take 1/turn from poison. :*Damage powers: Sometimes damage powers that deal damage equal to a percentage of each enemy's health can be useful. It's not as reliable a method as poison since it goes off current HP instead of max HP. However, it can be useful to determine the HP of multiple enemies at once. Tip: Charge up the power(s) in an earlier wave so you can use it immediately on a fresh wave(s). Tip: The numbers can disappear quickly, but you can keep them on the screen by pausing the game (tap the gear in the top-right corner). Tip: For enemies that are too weak (low HP, low defence) to risk accidentally defeating with attacks, if you can rely entirely on the Doctor's powers to determine the enemy's HP, you can use the doctor enhance perk that gives you 3 charges upon taking damage to allow you to charge up the power without making any combos. Note: Unfortunately, this can be difficult to use against enemies with convert powers (since it might not be possible to avoid making a combo). ;Determining defence :*Attack: The most straightforward method; just attack and note the difference between your character's attack strength and the damage actually dealt by that character. Note: Perks and color affinities may affect this, so try to avoid that since it makes the calculations more difficult. :*Damage power: These can also be useful if the damage power deals a fixed amount of damage, since defence will apply to the damage. Note: Color affinities affect this. Tip: Some enemies have extremely high defence, so it can be difficult to get a attack by one character larger than their defence. The best way to do so involves the following three things: (1) You need a character with one of the highest atk stats in the color you're using to attack (3000+ is where you want to be with a max level rank 5 character); (2) you need allies that can convert the entire board to the color of the ally in 1; (3) you need to boost the gems on the board as much as possible (boost powers don't stack, but some give larger bonuses). To maximize the chances you break through the enemy's defence, you may also want to do the following things: (1) Use an attack color the enemy is weak against; (2) bring along a character with a Gem Drop power matching the attack color; (3) use the weakness enhance perk along with 1 (note: if you use 1 and/or 3, take your character's attack strength and multiply it by 2 or 2.5, depending on whether you're using weakness enhance). See User blog:ThatDWLguy/Gem converting for teambuilding specifics. Note: In addition to the above, the color knowledge perk reduces the enemy's defence by 25%. If you are using the color knowledge perk matching the enemy, simply divide the number you get by 0.75 to get the enemy's actual defence. ;Determining attack Not much to say here. Get attacked and note how much damage the attack deals. Color affinities don't come into play at all. Tip: Remove damage reduction perks to make things simpler. ;Determining attack cooldown Same thing here. Just note the number when the enemy is going to attack, either when it shows up in the wave preparing to attack or right after it's used a power/attacked. ;Determining powers/power cooldowns This can be somewhat complicated, since powers are used randomly. Some powers are guaranteed to be used in some order at the start of a wave, but this isn't generally true. The basic method is to just stall and tank the attacks/powers without attacking (a lot) yourself, until you're fairly confident you've gotten all of the powers and cooldowns, along with their effects. Note: Some powers will only be used when the enemy falls below a certain percentage of HP. This can complicate matters, but will probably only matter for important enemies (i.e. bosses). Category:Blog posts Category:Community blogs